This research focuses on institutional changes that happened during the formation of a software organizational field on a peripheral region. The objective is to describe these changes and investigate the influence of the institutional environments. The adoption of case study in this research is justified by the complex nature and singularity of the object and the exploration of theoretical shortcomings. One fundamental change observed was the breaking with the professional norm of "exclusive duty" by the university teachers (GREENWOOD; SUDDABY; HININGS, 2002); and another one was the surpassing of legitimacy threshold by the new ventures (ZIMMERMAN; ZEITZ, 2002). While the peripheral context allowed an institutional malleability that seems to have favored the linkage between the university and the firms, the semi-peripheral context facilitated the provision of the "entrepreneurial consumers". A critical appraisal of a concept of organizational field that emphasizes the interactions among the field actors themselves (SCOTT, 1994, p. 207-208) is made because it tends to obstruct a deep analysis of organizational fields that extends through disparate environments.
institutional change; organizational fields; periphery and semi-periphery; innovation; information technology
